Heroin and the Ferguson Effect

Is the drug to blame for rising crime?

In my column this week, I mentioned a recent report from Sean Kennedy and Parker Abt of the American Enterprise Institute. Comparing 25 cities, they found a close correlation between Mexican heroin-cartel activity (as of a 2015 federal report) and changing homicide trends. In cities with only one cartel, homicide went down or stayed steady between 2014 and 2016; in cities with multiple cartels vying for turf, homicide went up. This pattern held for 21 out of the 25 cities.

Here are their data—which I requested for another project I’m working on (and many thanks to them for providing)—in chart form:

The pattern is indeed striking. And interestingly, it varies over the two-year period. When you compare just 2014 and 2015, there doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern at all—most cities saw homicide increases regardless of cartel activity. (This next chart just includes Kennedy and Abt’s data, but I confirmed the result by expanding them to include more cities and data for the full years.)

But between 2015 and 2016, the pattern is quite dramatic. Most of the cities with only one cartel actually saw their homicide rates drop quite a bit. If you tweak Kennedy and Abt’s test a little, you can say a single pattern explains 23 out of the 25 data points: Cities with only one cartel saw declines of at least 12.5 percent; cities with more than one cartel saw smaller declines or, more frequently, increases.

Milwaukee, which has one cartel, is probably the most dramatic example: its homicide rate doubled between 2014 and 2015, but fell by a third in 2016.

If I had to weave together a narrative that explains everything—and I’m an opinion journalist, so why not?—it would be something like this: between the first half of 2014 and the first half of 2015, we had a lot of unrest related to police shootings of black suspects, including in Ferguson itself. This played a strong role in driving up crime in 2015. As I noted in an earlier piece, cities with high black populations were more likely to see crime go up, and in several cities (e.g., Baltimore and Chicago), rising crime perfectly coincided with local policing incidents. In 2016, this “Ferguson Effect” may have waned—at least until last week, knock on wood—but rising cartel violence, perhaps a delayed result of the early 2014 arrest of El Chapo, kept crime from falling in much of the country.

There’s much we don’t know yet—for instance, exactly how cartel activity is changing over time in all these cities, and which other demographic variables (Hispanic population, family structure) correlate with crime increases. And we shouldn’t draw too many conclusions from a small set of big cities. So file that under speculation for now.

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5 Responses to Heroin and the Ferguson Effect

I believe there’s one more important factor to mention: whether those cartels use their own soldiers or do a kind of criminal outsourcing by hiring lower-tier gangs for menial tasks. Highly organized criminal organizations, as dangerous as they are economically, are less prone to unnecessary violence. A thing that cannot be said in regards to various boyz from da hood who don’t understand even that simple fact that more corpses attract more cops. A situation that ain’t favorable at all for any criminal business.

Here’s a test: are the incremental murder victims Mexican? If the increase in murders are due to cartel vs. cartel violence, then the victims should be Hispanic.

Yet, the big increases in homicide in 2015 over 2014 appear to have been in heavily black cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.

Still, it’s possible that Mexican cartels are involved in the homicide spike. Sam Quinones’s book “Dreamland” reports that a half decade ago Mexican heroin dealers in the U.S. had a policy of not dealing with African-Americans, whom they saw as trouble. Instead, the cartels sold to beaten down whites, who tended to be nonviolent.

Perhaps the Mexican cartels have started dealing heroin to black urban gangs, who are now shooting each other over the new drug opportunities the way black gangs shot each other in 1990 over the new crack-dealing opportunities?

The key question re: the Ferguson effect is whether arrest rates for violent crimes decreased when the police (allegedly) eased off their duties. Moreover, if they did in fact ease off, we still don’t know why: I find it more probable, since we’re all just speculating here, that they are exercising a work slowdown in protest of what they view as unfair public scrutiny, rather than that they are ‘afraid to do their jobs’ in the face of violent criminals. Because after all, BLM and such are not actually making any noise over the shooting of civilians armed with guns, so why would a cop be hesitant to ‘do their job’ when it comes to armed criminals?